Constructing Identities with SJ Sindu

On this week’s episode Bethanne sits down with author S.J. Sindu to discuss gender queerness and the importance of defining such a term, especially in the political environment of today. SJ’s newest book, Tall Water will be released in August of 2025 by HarperCollins.

Should Revolutionary Road be kicked to the curb? Or should Richard Yates’ book be able to live in the canon? Bethanne believes it is ‘a perfect novel’, but can she convince you listeners as well?

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include Devil is Fine by John Vercher, Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, and Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: Tall Water by SJ Sindu,

Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone,

The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway,

Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes,

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck,

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher,

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine,

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters,

The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels,

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo,

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates,

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy,

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald,

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

Devil is Fine by John Vercher,

Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton,

The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen,

Orlando by Virginia Woolf,

Fairest by Meredith Talusan,

Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler,

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante.

Transcript:

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first!

This week, I talked to SJ Sindu about their new book Tall Water. Join us as we talk about gender queerness and the importance of defining such a term.

BP: So, did you grow up in Massachusetts, correct?

SS: Partly. I partly grew up in Sri Lanka, then I moved to Massachusetts and moved around Massachusetts quite a bit. In high school, I ended up in South Dakota. Wow. Okay. So quite a range there.

BP: That is quite a range. Oh my goodness. And let's leave everything else out of the equation. That would have been a culture shock. What part of Massachusetts were you in when you left?

SS: When I left, I was in the suburbs of Boston.

BP: Oh my goodness. I can't imagine how jarring that must have been. And, and this is getting us to more of the main subject I wanted to talk with you about. So you're a teenager. You're coming into consciousness of yourself as a human adult, as a sexual being, and also as someone who, besides sexuality and all the other things that go along with adolescence, you're also figuring out your identity. At what point did you realize that you were in the category that we loosely use the term genderqueer for?

SS: It took a while. I think I started to kind of be exposed to alternative genders and sexualities in my high school in Waltham, Massachusetts and Winchester, Massachusetts. It was a very open, progressive leftist environment. I had classmates and friends who were in a throuple as freshmen in high school. And I had queer friends, so I was being exposed to it. That was around the time when I was a freshman when 9/11 happened. Everyone was in this environment of political growth. We were all being forced to become politically active in one way or another because it was our generation that was going to fight the Iraq war and the Afghani war. We were becoming really outward-facing to the world in a way that many teenagers don't do until they're older.

BP: I think this is such an important point that because of those stresses on our society and culture, you had to say, okay, we're going to be who we really are. We are not going to necessarily fit into any specific boxes that you make. There are bigger things to be faced.

SS: Yes. And I saw a lot of my friends become really politically active in the wake of 9/11. I wasn't. But then I moved to South Dakota.

BP: Well, that, and that is the next, thereby hangs a tale. So, you moved to South Dakota and what was that like? I don’t want to assume anything because I immediately think of South Dakota and I think of the TV series Yellowstone. I think of people conforming and having this idea and that idea, but I could be wrong. Maybe there was a thriving queer community where you were in South Dakota.

SS: I wouldn't say thriving. We definitely existed. This was Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2002. It was very small, very conservative, very religious—religious as in very specifically, there were like three churches that people went to. There was a literal cornfield across the street from my high school. But it was still, sort of, a city. There was some diversity to be found. There were like five of us that were kind of questioning sexuality, questioning gender in our school. Gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts after I left, and I was like, okay. In South Dakota, though, it became a hot-button issue in our school. There were physical fistfights about the issue of queerness. There were teachers who would yell at students if they held hands in the hallway if they were queer. There was no support to be found, so we had to support each other. At that point, I wasn't really concerned about me. I was more trying to be an ally because I wasn't dating. I wasn't allowed to date. I'm from a South Asian family, so I wasn't allowed to date. So for me, queerness really started with trying to help the community as an ally. And then when I went to college, I found a thriving group of queer people, a thriving queer community in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places. And that's where I was like, oh, I don't think I'm straight. I don't think I'm cisgender. And within two years, my sophomore year of college, I had come out first as bisexual, then I started to use the word queer and then specifically as genderqueer.

BP: As someone who's much older and doesn't feel I can take on the queer identification too easily or in a flippant way, I just want you to, do you alternate between the way you present? And I think that is important because that might also affect your fiction.

SS: That's a great question. When I was younger, I definitely tried to present more masculine because I felt like, and it's not just my feeling, this was the general culture in the queer community that "real" androgynous people or "real" non-binary people dressed in an androgynous way. And if you didn’t dress more masculine, my genderqueerness wouldn't be believed. So for me, it has always been an internal thing, never an external thing. I love fashion, I love style, I love makeup and jewelry, and things that bling. Externally, I love all of those things. I love femme presentation and femme fashion, as well as butch presentation and butch fashion. I just love the way fashion and style can communicate important details about us, including gender. I’m fascinated by that on a scholarly level. But when I was younger, I felt like I had to participate in it so that people would accept that I was genderqueer. Now, the culture has completely changed, and it is a free-for-all, and I love it. When I tell young people that I’m genderqueer, and I may have red lipstick and a skirt on, they’re just like, "Okay, great," and they move on, and it’s wonderful. We've achieved that sort of freedom now. The only thing they ask me is why genderqueer and why not non-binary or agender or other non-binary labels.

BP: Well, let's talk about that. That's exactly it because I think—and I'm going to say what I think just so we can see it's kind of like a game show—how close can Bethanne come to this? You know, I want to say, your thoughts about taking on what the community believed, taking on certain masculine kinds of hair, clothes, et cetera... You know, I went to Smith in the '80s and believe me, Birkenstocks were very political then. Now we all wear Birkenstocks, right? And it doesn't matter. But there was a sense of if you liked lipstick, if you liked earrings, you don't tell me you're a lesbian, being with that red lipstick on. I saw a lot of people go through that. I instead was given a pin that said “hopelessly heterosexual,” and yet, and this is why I'm so interested in what you're saying about the strides that have been made. I think of myself completely—my mind is so queer, right? And that it has nothing to do with my long-term cishet monogamous marriage. It has nothing to do with anything except how I feel about what you're saying: anything goes. And it's wonderful. One of my favorite celebrities in the world is Alan Cumming, and Alan Cumming can put on a full suit, put on a dress, put on a big brooch, do whatever he likes. So to me, that gives you this internal freedom that you can then put on the page. Am I getting closer to that?

SS: Yes, I think for me, the fiction is definitely a big part of the genderqueerness. I don't know what it's like to feel like a gender. I never have. Internally, I don't know what people mean when they say that. It's fun for me to inhabit my characters. As a fiction writer, I need to be able to sink into characters regardless of gender. I love being able to write from the masculine perspective, from men's perspectives. I find that malleability in gender really fun to do in a creative way. And that's how it really bleeds into my fiction—being able to get into the heads of characters regardless of their gender.

BP: One last thing about the term genderqueer. You were mentioning a little while ago about people saying, "Well, why not non-binary? Why not this? Why not that?" And I thought, well, what you were saying about never feeling one gender or the other for whatever reason, it seems to me that genderqueer is actually the most descriptive term for you from what you've said to me today. So I just wanted to get your perspective on that and then we can definitely let you get back to a very busy Thursday.

SS: I think it is the most accurate for me, mostly because, while I do use non-binary sometimes, and there is that non-binary umbrella under which I fall, genderqueer to me is an active term because of the word queer. Queer is a political term, it always has been, at least for the last 50 years. It's a term that's been successfully reclaimed, and it is connected to both artists and activists and also academics. And I'm all three. For me, genderqueer calls back that lineage of community care, community activism, and transformative justice, and that's the kind of lineage I always want to think of.

BP: And that's a lineage I know you are now passing on to students and to people all around, whether genderqueer or allies, who need to learn more about it.

SS: Yes, as some of my students have called me an elder gay, and I’m like, "I feel too young for that label!" But, I mean, it is important in a community to have that kind of intergenerational contact and communication, specifically for the queer community because of the AIDS crisis and because it was ignored for so long, we have lost so many of our elders. It is really my generation that has to step in and guide younger people because otherwise our heritage will be lost.

BP: Thank you Sindu for joining us this week. You can find all of Sindu’s books wherever books are sold. Now, let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you’ve been reading this week.

Welcome back to another set of Friday Reads posts that we're going to sort of deconstruct, if you will, as usual, I've got my producer Jordan here to look at them with me. And Jordan, what do we have up first this week?

Yeah, Melina, who's reading The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway, and she had an image of a book jacket with birds turning into alphabet letters, as a man thinks.

BP: You know, I really like this one because it's such a fresh release. This book is, I believe it may be out in the United States now, as well as in the UK, but Patrick Holloway is an award winning writer in Ireland. I love this book jacket because I'm not sure if the birds are turning into letters or the letters are turning into birds. There's a man on a park bench. There's a woman coming close to him. And so it's just a very, very cool looking book and like his protagonist, and I'm going to mangle this name. I believe you say Oisin, is the man's name, O I S I N. But like Oisin, the protagonist, Holloway, the author, spent quite a bit of time in Brazil. He, in fact, completed his doctorate there. And so in this book, there's a little bit of auto fiction. We've got Oisin returning to Ireland from Brazil. He's got a partner and a child. And when he gets back, he discovers that he has a completely new outlook on how language contributes to personality. And that includes the language that his grandmother with dementia now uses really. One of my favorite recent characters in contemporary fiction, this grandmother, so check her out. I would say if you love Colm Toibin and Enright and Topé Folarin, who has been a friend of the pod, I think you might really appreciate The combination of authorial experience along with a little bit of fiction added in. So what's next?

JA: Up next, we've got from Thomas, and I'm going to have a little bit of a pronunciation disclaimer myself. He's reading Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes. And he shared an image of a potboiler paperback cover priced at 50 cents, perhaps in the 1950s.

BP: Yeah, actually, this is funny, because I thought you were going to say Helen MacInnes. And I didn't know you were getting Brittany to Brittany. I've been there and I still don't know how to pronounce it. That is so great. Assignment in Brittany. And I love this cover that Thomas has put up. Because It's just seeing the 50 cents and, and it's the little C without the tiny lines at top and bottom that we usually see when we've had the cents symbol these days, it's, you know, a very distinct font.

And actually, this book was written in 1942 or published in 1942, I believe. And so I don't even know where the cover comes from, but McInnes wrote 21 thrillers. Okay. And for a woman in 1930s, 40s, 50s, uh, England and America, that was a pretty great literary career. She was inspired by her husband, Gilbert Hyatt.

I think that's how you say that name. He was an intelligence operative for MI6, and they traveled together quite a bit. And this particular book was inspired by their honeymoon in Bavaria in the late 30s. So McInnes herself took very careful notes about the growing power of Nazis in Germany. Hmm. I wonder what this is reminding me of.

But she used a lot of her observations to great effect in this tale of a British agent who disguises himself as a Breton farmer during World War II to help the French Resistance. And if you love World War II fiction, there's so much. There's Graham Greene. There's Alan Furst. There's Ariel Lawhon's Codename Hélène. There's so many. Um, The Invisible Woman by Erika Roebuck. McInnes is OG espionage royalty, so, uh, check her out. I don't think many of us read Helen McInnes anymore, so, Jordan, thank you so much for that one. What do we have for our third Friday Reads post?

JA: Yeah, last but not least today, we've got, um, from Matt, who's reading The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Seifer. And the image shared here is of the book jacket, which includes the Stonewall Honor decal.

BP: You know, and I'm not sure from the decal if the skin in its girl, you know, which place it won in the honors, but I think it's very cool that it did win one of the Stonewall honors. And Cypher lives in Austin. Her background is Lebanese, but I believe Betty, the main character in The Skin and its Girl, is Palestinian.

But the point about it is that Betty is queer and Betty has blue skin. There are a couple of reasons for this, okay? The blue skin sets her apart from most other people. That Absolutely evokes queerness, and for many readers, it will also denote Betty's, um, you know, ethnicity and background, and so one of the reasons I wanted to choose this one specifically is not only that Matt said it was an important book to him and he wanted others to read it, but the book isn't perfect, okay?

That is not a criticism. The book is a little overlong. It's got some problems with one subplot being too much. I don't care. Does that mean it doesn't have a lot of great things, important things to convey? No, it does not. Imperfect books can be some of the most memorable ones, and I just want to underscore that point.

If you're a fan of A Memory Called Empire by R. K. D. Martine, that's a space opera, or The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, That's historical. Any of the T. J. Klune novels, The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickles, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Melinda Lowe, all of these and more. There is fantastic queer fiction out there today and I think what's really cool is that The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is an historical novel in that tradition and it is one that is eminently worth reading.

So that's it for this week's Friday Reads. Jordan, I appreciate your participation as always. Have a great week.

The communities we live in directly shape our own identities and the way we present ourselves to others. One book that critiques this dynamic is Revolutionary Road. On its purpose, author Richard Yates said, “I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.” Talking to Sindu about the ways we can push back against conformity made me think this would be a great time to reconsider Revolutionary Road as a canonical classic. So will we can-on the classic story of suburban rebellion, or can it forever?

Spoiler alert! I believe Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is a perfect novel.

And that means I'll likely be judging it as canon. However, in this case, I want to prove mine to you. Let's discuss the term perfect novel. I'm hardly the first to use it, and it's been linked to more works of fiction than you might realize. And it doesn't have to do with length. Anna Karenina has 864 pages, The Great Gatsby has 208, 100 Years of Solitude has about 450, and they're all considered quote unquote perfect.

A perfect novel does what it sets out to do. And then overachieves. A perfect novel engages a reader's emotion, imagination, and intellect. It's every element showing the author's purpose, whether that's to illuminate injustice like Salvage the Bones, break down a community like The House of Mirth, or tackle the most complicated ideas of philosophy, like in The Handmaid's Tale. Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road as an indictment of 1950s American suburban conformity, represented by a couple named Frank and April Wheeler who live in a Connecticut suburban development named Revolutionary Hills. They are so privileged that they think they're better than all of their neighbors because they have Thots, and sometimes the hots, but we'll get to that in a bit.

We know immediately the author understands his characters aren't all that, because the story opens with April's attempt at a star turn in a drama society production of “The Petrified Forest” by Robert E. Sherwood, April playing the lead. Gabby is straight up wretched. Despite the heavy makeup, you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck.

Of course, neither April nor Frank, nor any of their social circles, see that the petrified forest stands for their own fossilized lives. Taken as written, Frank is the very model of a modern mainstream gentleman. April, his trustee, helped meet. However, for Yates, the boredom is the starting point, not the end game.

The more dissatisfied the pair gets and the more they dream inchoately of giving it all up and moving to Paris, the faster Yates can hasten them to their doom. Because what makes this novel perfect is that its author makes almost no attempt to develop his characters and allows their attempts to develop a different life to fall flat.

He establishes their failure not through description, but through dialogue, letting them damn themselves with faint praise. At one point, when Frank attempts to repeat one of his old chestnuts to a captive audience, April says, You told them that story last year. And readers can almost picture a white man collapsing like a balloon losing helium.

Yet what actually makes this novel perfect for me isn't just its economy and its nearly allegorical cast of characters. Frank, the war stunted avatar of manhood. April, culture's conscript as housewife. The neighbor's on the spectrum son doomed to play the prophet. What makes Revolutionary Road complete is how Yates employs another old chestnut, the tragic flaw, to display Frank and April's destructive relationship.

As they push and shove, trying to be the star of their own little show, the couple's individual weaknesses make the marriage disintegrate. Another balloon.

But speaking of childish things, did you ever have one of those cloth dolls with a skirt that could first be Red Riding Hood, then the Big Bad Wolf, just by turning it upside down? While you're reading this novel, you see marriage as a trap, maybe even as the rusty kind with pointed teeth very useful for catching wolves.

But when you finish and put it down, you see that revolutionary road. looked at with its skirt flung back offers a blueprint for the things that work in a marriage. If you can be vulnerable with a partner while also maintaining your own measure of self esteem, a balance that, take it from me, a very long married person, requires real amounts of sweat and sprezzatura, then you, dear reader, will find conforming to a beloved quite different from conforming to society.

Pretty perfect persuasion. I'm canoning Revolutionary Road.

One of the major points of my conversation with Sindu was the idea of identity as a construct. Finding meaning within our own identities can be hard work, and lead to conflict with the systems around us. Today, I want to share six recommendations for books about constructing identity.

This week's Six Recs is on a theme of constructing identity. And as we talked to SJ Sindhu, we were talking a great deal about queer identity and non binary identity. But when I started looking for books, I realized that I was interested in those identities and others as well. But you'll, we'll see what you all think of my choices.

As usual, my producer Jordan is here to time me if I can give some six recommendations in three minutes or less. Then I escape the falling bookcase. Are we ready, Jordan? What do you think?

JA: We're rolling.

BP: Okay. Number one, John Vercher's Devil Is Fine. Here's the premise. Your identity is black and you inherit your white grandfather's plantation.

What do you do? Even as locals in the town where the plantation is, Call the unnamed novelist, narrator, Coulson, half whitehead. He's struggling with how to escape the socially relevant but not threatening rut he's written himself into. It's a smart, dark, wry look at how our culture copes with changing ideas about racial identity.

Next up is Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton. Now, she's a cultural critic and novelist. This is a non fiction slash book of criticism that explores personal branding from quote Da Vinci to the Kardashians unquote. How's that? The book itself is the message here. So many figures and symbols and ideas crammed between two covers that we see when anything is possible.

Some of us stay on the surface. It's instructive, though, to see how many self help trends originated centuries ago. Next, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, and a caveat here, Rosen is a fellow at the fairly conservative American Enterprise Institute, okay? Um, not necessarily the place where I go for progressive.

Of looks at social, um, media and technology. But I think that this is interesting because Rosen doesn't seem to believe that technology is a tool, okay? And as we seek to expand notions of identity, we have to look at how we move through the world. Does technology help us or hinder us? So. If you skim this book, you don't have to read the whole thing necessarily.

You can understand what parts of your identity technology enhances. And listen, uh, I'm going to say this as quickly as I can. Look at Becca Rothfeld's great Washington Post review of this book because as she points out, once upon a time, people thought that the dangerous new technology was reading. Next, Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

It's one of the best modern takes on gender as a social construct through time, since Orlando is a time traveler who takes on male, female clothes, habits, sexuality, privileges, and it derives so much from Virginia Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West, her great love. It's, according to the latter's son, Sackville-West's son, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Next, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, and this is about growing up trans and albino in the Philippines. It is intersectionality in one person, okay? So Talusan switched sex assigned at birth, passed as one race instead of another, chose a gender category and a new life path on a new continent. There could have been three or four memoirs here, but the point is Talusan has a purpose in layering it all together because she wants to explore how complex identity is.

And it's a great book to read along with Lucy Sante's recent I Heard Her Call My Name. Finally, Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender. I mentioned Virginia Woolf already, and this is kind of a little, um, I guess a little tease to the, um, play, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which doesn't have that much to do with Virginia Woolf, but who is afraid of gender?

I'm a cishet white woman in a decades-long monogamous traditional marriage, yet. I will never forget the first time I read Butler's work in 1988, my mind was blown. Feminism wasn't just about ladylike ladies. So, so many of Butler's books have been important to me and this one is their most personal.

It's a response to ad hominem attacks they've experienced and they know so, so many non binary and trans people have also experienced. Did I do well, Jordan?

JA: We came in at four minutes and 18 seconds, so quite over. I think the bookshelf is going to fall. We'll have to clean that big mess of books up.

BP: Next week, I'll do better.

But you know what? These books are great. So thank you again so much, Jordan. See you all next week. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, a literary review, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick.

It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.